Making things simple can be surprisingly difficult. However, when after days of work what you have to show is one easy to follow diagram or a concise paragraph that can explain everything, that’s the sign you’re on the right track. By making things simple you’re not proving what you’re working on wasn’t that complicated in the first place, but rather your skill and effort has been spent empowering anyone - including the busy c-suite executive - to be able to comprehend the issue properly.

Compliance is Complicated

Compliance can be a complex beast. It involves understanding a whole host of laws, rules, resolutions, and guidelines and understanding everything about how your industry works (the processes, the staff, the product, the customers, and so on)…and then figuring out how all the former applies to all the latter, and what systematic steps you need to take to ensure you’re complying. And finally, explaining that to someone else in a way that they can comprehend what’s important and what’s not.

One of the things I’ve seen when mentoring people in my teams is that more junior staff members often feel that they need to express and share this complexity. There’s many reasons for this, from wanting to show how much work they’re doing, to a desire to make sure that everything someone might need to know is available. However, when organizations scale - when they grow and increase the number of staff - they have to be aware of the cost of having everyone know the details on everything. Pretty soon employees find that they’re spending most of their time communicating, passing information on and around, with less time to concentrate on their own work. We need to spend effort simplifying so these concepts can be expressed quickly and easily without much overhead.

The Cost of Details

You can think about the amount of information you share as having a cost. Not just the immediate time you and who you share the information with directly spend working on it, but also the time the people they communicate about this with spend, and so on. The more succinct and coherent you can make an explanation the lower the cost - multiplied by everyone you hope will want to hear it. Sooner or later busy people - people like the CEO and senior management who you want to have at least a cursory understanding of what your compliance team is up to - will start to simply drop things on the floor that they don’t have the time to spend on. This means you can think of time your team spend on simplification as “prepping this for the C-suite” if you want.

A surprising thing is that the person you might be communicating most to is…yourself; Yourself six months from now when you’ve come back to something that you haven’t paid attention to for half a year where you’ll need to get back up to speed really quickly. If you can make it simple for future you to understand, all the better.

Simplify, Not Hide

The key thing to understand here is that we’re trying to simplify things, not hide things - we don’t want to create silos in the organization. We don’t want to remove necessary detail but structure the way we communicate what needs to happen and why so it’s possible for someone else to follow the logic behind what we’re planning without having to delve deep into irrelevant chaff along the way. For example, a flow diagram showing which rules applies to us can omit irrelevant paths and will be much easier to understand than the original source text of the rules. A bullet list up front of the key points with links to the details will be much clearer than several pages of text that you must consume before getting to the nub of the issue. Ideally you’d be able to express the heart of the problem in a sentence or two - your elevator pitch for why the work is happening - and provide follow up detail.

All of this is a lot of work. Not only do we have to decide what is and isn’t important, but also what is most important so we can express this first - and also ensure at the same time what we’re explaining can be expressed in a consistent followable narrative that someone else can digest easily. While we now have automated tools that can summarize text, what we’re talking about here is going beyond that - creating a whole conceptual model and framework for describing the issue so we can express it simply and succinctly.

What our goal is is encapsulation and progressive enhancement. We want it to be possible for someone to not have to learn every detail about the compliance issue to quickly understand the core ideas (encapsulation), and if necessary be able to get dive in and read more detail on particular aspects by consuming supplemental parts as needed (progressive enhancement).

If we do this right, we can save everyone a lot of time - including any auditors in audits we may have to do, since now we can quickly explain to them what we’re doing.

Unexpected Complexity

Complexity can come from many sources beyond just the large numbers of rules the company needs to follow and the bredth of the company’s operation, including:

• Temporal complexity, as things or opinions change over time. For example, rules and regulations change as they’re modified, or your company may get a new legal opinion that drastically changes what you believe is and isn’t okay now.
• Differing understandings within the company about something in the company. In my experience it’s not uncommon for one person to think a process or software works one way, and another in the firm to come across later and say it works another. I can’t count the number of times I’ve sat down with different parties with diagrams I’ve created based on what previous employees have told me to only have to refine it based on “yes, well, but actually…”. Getting everyone on the same page can take considerable effort!
• Large Data that takes you time to go through; You might have a large number of customers and be unsure if any of them are subject to a law or regulation. The complexity here comes not only from the sheer number of things (which may require much automated processing since it’s too much to do by hand) but also defining process that demonstrates you’ve provably processed all of the data and nothing has been missed.

All of this complexity is ripe for encapsulation so not everybody has to deal with the nitty gritty, but you’ll have to remain cognisent of the audience; If someone is used to operating under previous versions of the regulation you’ll have to ensure they understand about the update or confusion will rule. If different people operate on different assumptions about processes in the business you’re going to have to explain things to get them singing from the same song sheet. As always it’s a balancing act.

Practical Steps

Now we’ve got a clear understanding of why we need to spend effort making things simple to explain, let’s talk how we go about it. Truth be told, this is a practice that we learn and refine over our whole careers, but I do have short list of advice I give to people I’m mentoring who want a quick leg up to better practice:

• To fully be able to explain something succinctly is to understand it completely. Don’t expect to be able to produce the perfect summary straight away, but instead work on scrappy versions of diagrams and bullet points as you go. You can refine these as you learn more, but be prepared once you’ve learnt more to completely throw these away (or make them available as supplementary material) and draw/write something short and new now you’ve got better understanding to communicate.
• The military like to “BLUF” their documents, including the Bottom Line Up Front. The internet calls this “tl;dr” (too long; didn’t read). Either way, I like to put a summary of whatever I’m writing (email, word document, confluence page, even long form slack messages) at the very top. And put it in bold. And assume that it’s the only thing someone is going to read.
• Similarly, if I’m preparing a “reading” slide deck (something designed to be emailed over rather than presented) then I like to have just a few slides at the start that I actually expect the audience to read, and then a clearly delimitated section at the end (an “appendix”) that contains all the details for the people that need them.
• Speaking of putting things in bold, I like to abuse bold for emphasizing key points and action items in messages. Just because I find compliance one of the most facinating things in the world doesn’t make this true for everybody! Let’s make it easy for them to see why they should care about this email.
• Communications work best with context but with limited waffle. Getting the balance right in the company wide email can be quite hard - but can be greatly improved by taking just a half a sentence to say “As part of our effort to reticulate splines to get the flux capactiating we need to…” and then providing links to documentation at the end of the email assuming that the email will be read by a new employee on day one.

Conclusion: Simplifying is How We Think

In the end, we need to make clear strategic decisions about compliance work in the business if we’re going to have any meaningful impact. Doing this is impossible if we can’t determine what’s important rather than just being overloaded by details. We need to put the effort into simplifying the problem first till we have a proper understanding of the core of issue, and this way we can see the likely strategic outcomes of our work.

Last modified on 2025-06-27